::Arc Poetry:: Great Scots - August 2006 Archive ::

August 10, 2006

August 2006 : Feature

Tom Pow introducing Don McKay

In “Fridge Nocturne”, a short poem near the beginning of Don McKay’s selected poems, the sleepless poet lies listening to the sound of his fridge, ‘the old/armless weeping willow of the kitchen’. The fridge’s “Humble murmur” brings to his mind several distant rivers—“the Saugeen, the Goulais/the Raisin”. The permeability of the border between the domestic world and the wilderness which lies beyond it marks a landscape whose vastness teaches early that, “Lonely is a knife whose handle fits the mind/too well, its oldest and most hospitable friend” (“Nocturnal Animals”). However, “There is a loneliness/ which must be entered rather than resolved” (“On Leaving”) and to enter the wilderness with Don McKay is to have the sharpest, most informed and responsive guide. Here are his thoughts on the White-throated Sparrow:

I was thinking of the muscles in that grey-white breast,
pectoralis major powering each downstroke,
pectoralis minor with its rope-and-pulley tendon
reaching through the shoulder to the
topside of the humerus to haul it up again;
of the sternum with the extra keel it has evolved to
anchor all that effort, of the dark wind
and the white curl on the waves below, the slow dawn
and the thickening shoreline. _(“Load”)

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Scotland-Canada